The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 15 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Sam Lessin: YC-style customer discovery is obsolete for building AI businesses
“That customer discovery, YC style, like blah, blah, blah, is just so wrong for the moment in terms of how to build a business. Because just because like bill in sales has some CRM shim problem, it doesn't matter. Like you can't build it and give it to him and …”
Sam Lessin calls YC's product-market fit mantra an antiquated story
“You know, the YC story of all you need is product market fit and move on. I think it's just like a very antiquated story.”
Sam Lessin: Garry Tan Warned YC Founders Against Slow's Etiquette School
“Gary Tan, who runs YC, is a response to this, which is, PSA, do not attend SLO's Etiquette School”
Sam Lessin: YC's advice to customer-chat your way to startup ideas fails
“And this is also why, like, I mean, I, you know, I haven't shat on YC in a while. So like, it's probably time for that again. But like, it's like the idea that you go to like some thing and like you customer chat your way by talking to like business people int…”
Morin: YC and Early-Stage Startup Valuations Are 20% to 40% Too High
“Like I went in there and I'm like, wow, like we're talking 25, 30, 35, 40, like the prices are just still too high. And so part of me is like, you know, if you look at the real estate market, you look at the, even the early stage startup market, like these pri…”
Morin: Roughly one-third of YC's winter batch is building OpenClaw projects
“The word on the street is something like a third of the, of Y Combinator is open claw already. And they're winter class.”
Jessica Lessin: Garry Tan and tech leaders are organizing against wealth taxes
“I mean, what, what's interesting to me now is like their attempts to organize the tech community to fight, fight this more formally. I think Gary Tan at YC has been very vocal about that,”
Morin: YC Demo Day featured three separate AI fishing startups
“Almost everything was AI plus vertical of some, you know, sort of AI plus this vertical. And there were actually three AI fishing startups yesterday, but only one of them had somebody who had grown up in a fishing family”
Lessin: Y Combinator companies are too expensive for investors to consider
“None of us would look at YC companies are too expensive, but the open pipe one, there's nothing to tip.”
Lessin: Generative AI makes every startup pitch look reasonable to investors
“Now we're at the point where like every company seems reasonable. Because it's all passed through 87 AIs at this point before you see it. And so it's not like the deck, it's like all this stuff seems reasonable.”
Lessin: Indexing all Y Combinator companies historically yields strong returns
“It turns out that if you look historically, well, almost all YC companies fail. If you index all the things that come through the front door, they've done fine, right? They've done pretty well.”
Morin: 80% of YC Demo Day Batch Was Agentic AI for SaaS CRM
“80% of YC was agentic AI for some SaaS CRM use case.”
Morin attended YC Demo Day specifically to meet app BitRig
“The reason that I was at Y Combinator yesterday is because I found a startup four weeks ago that I fa I found it on like the design internet. Like it wasn't even, I didn't even know it was a Y Combinator company and I started using it and I just fell in love w…”
Lessin passed on Scale AI because he feared business development challenges
“Now, interestingly, the reason I didn't invest then, which was clearly a mistake, I clearly shouldn't, It's like, you're like, there's a lot of people doing this, and I was really worried that the number one problem was business development.”